Vanda scaravelli yoga teacher training

The Teachings of the Late Vanda Scaravelli: A Workshop with Diane Long
By Sharon Steffensen

Diane Long was watching a t'ai chi demonstration in Florence, Italy, when a woman came up to her and said, "I want you to come see me.

She guides us into setting up our bodies so that the breath can take us into the pose. Let it be about gravity and the spine and let breath bring you into the pose....The body starts resting in the pose. "Treat the body in a rhythmic way and then rest. But it was not until I met one of Vanda’s long-time students that I began to understand that her life and teaching embodied what I had been seeking in yoga: a way to inhabit my body so that movement becomes meditation.

Vanda did not begin studying yoga until mid-life; she went on to make the practice her own, devising a way of working that was harmonious with nature and centered around rest, continual new discovery, and clear, uncluttered awareness.

She was initially influenced by the Iyengar style of yoga, but she eventually developed her own unique approach.

Scaravelli yoga is a type of yoga that emphasizes breath and spinal alignment. I go wide and down, and when I breathe and relax, I go up. A true and unselfconscious yogi, she believed that learning yoga required “infinite time and no ambition,” and that the teaching of yoga could not be organized into a “method.” She transmitted hands-on to individual students what she had discovered in her own body, the way that yoga has been taught for centuries.

Lessons might involve breathing with the arms draped over a broomstick, studying a photocopied image of the lungs before practicing breathing, or examining photographs of Krishnamacharya with a magnifying glass. Her student Rossella Baroncini summarizes it this way: “By consciously entrusting ourselves to the action of gravity and by letting our breathing expand, we learn to let go of the things we no longer need and renew ourselves in every moment.” She says that Vanda taught her to “look forward, being completely free from conditioning, memories, misconceptions,” and that “yoga is freedom and love.” Once when I commented to Diane about the amazing open, relaxed quality of Vanda’s hips in a photograph of her in Padmasana (lotus pose), Diane replied with a smile: “unconditional love for the world.” Vanda had an “essential simplicity, straightforwardness, matter-of-factness…that was her spirituality,” Diane says.

This release of the spine allows for a deep inhalation and exhalation of the breath, which helps to relax the mind and nervous system. Diane believes that Vanda saw these occasions as opportunities to “play” with breathing and pain.

Vanda was perceptive and candid in her interactions. Diane went to see her and became her student until Vanda died two years ago at the age of 91.

But if my going up is 'how far can I go wide, and down,' like a tree, it doesn't try to get taller than another tree. The division between the lower and upper parts of the spine is in an area she called the “back of the waist” or the “middle of the spine,” around the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae. She was introduced to yoga when her friend J.

Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, and the violinist Yehudi Menhuin invited T. Krishnamacharya from India to teach them yoga at her summer home in Switzerland. She distilled movement to a few essential principles: the surrender of the lower part of the body to gravity gives back a lightness that liberates the upper part of the body.

“She was looking for somebody to teach,” Diane says. Let everything release through the hands into the earth....In standing, the foot takes the ground and there is an aliveness there. In an article published in Viniyoga in Italia in 2000, one of Vanda’s students, Elizabeth Pauncz, recalls lessons in which she and Vanda “studied how birds used their feet in taking off into flight or landing and then practiced that same technique in Tadasana [mountain] which would lead to Urdhva Dhanurasana (upward bow).” Diane remembers lessons in which Vanda had her stand “on a stick, like a bird standing on a limb” or gently rock back and forth like a little boat on the water.

These are only a few of the creative means Vanda used as she found a unique way to teach each student.

The movement comes from the spine and hips—not the arms.